E-BOOK
The Maker’s UK Tax Handbook
If you make things and sell them, you are trading from the first sale, whatever the volume and whatever you call it. This is everything that follows from that: what you can deduct, what your equipment does to your tax bill, why your stock is worth more than you think, and how to charge for the hours nobody sees.
- The whole cost of a kiln against this year’s profit, and why the fortnight either side of your year end matters
- Two ways to claim for a studio at home, and the one that is worth several hundred pounds more if you fire
- The three kinds of stock you hold, and what counting only one of them does to your tax bill
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Who this book is for?
Anyone making things and selling them, on Etsy, at fairs, through their own site or all three. Potters, printers, jewellers, bakers, sewers, woodworkers and everybody else who has ever been asked what they do and hesitated. No prior knowledge assumed and no accountancy vocabulary used without explaining it first.
If you have just started
Chapter one settles the question you are actually asking. Making something in order to sell it is trading from the very first sale, and the thing that saves most small makers is not a volume test but the thousand pound trading allowance, measured on income rather than profit.
If you have been going a while
The chapters on equipment, stock and the home studio are where the money is. Most makers are claiming less than they could on all three, and the stock chapter is the one that changes the numbers most.
If you are wondering why it never feels worth it
Chapter seven. Materials multipliers cannot see how long something takes, making is about half your week, and the honest hourly figure is usually half what you thought. The answer is rarely to work longer.
FACTS
55p a mile
The mileage rate from 6 April 2026, up from 45p and the first increase since 2011. Three thousand business miles is £1,650 of deduction, and almost nobody logs the trips to buy materials.
300 units a month
the break-even
11 chapters
One sitting
FACTS
47 per cent
How much of a maker’s closing stock is missed by counting only the finished shelf, on the worked example. Understating stock overstates your cost of sales, which understates your profit. It feels like a smaller tax bill and it is simply wrong.